Battle Felines
by Felisundae
Summary: Rusty leaves his cushy, well-fed life of a house cat behind as he enters the local woods and learns the mysterious ways of woodland cats.


On a very plain and boring spring morning, Rusty the cat awoke violently from his very disturbing dream about grass and mice, making him spill his newly-poured kitty chow all over the kitchen floor.

"Aw, nuts!" he said, "Now I won't have anything to eat until dinner…maybe there's something in the garden…"

He moped his way towards the screen door, and tried to get his owners' attention by meowing really loudly. But they didn't even notice him, so he just glared at them angrily and karate-chopped his way outside.

"Now...food, food...where the heck do I find food?" he said aloud as he looked around the pitiful back-yard. There was little to no vegetation in the garden except for a very tiny bush, which Rusty soon discovered to only house ants. He didn't want to eat ants, so he decided to look towards new horizons (the neighbour's horizon, to be exact).

He jumped onto the fence and made his way towards the new garden, but just as he was nearing a bush that almost indefinitely housed some form of mammal, a huge blob slid out of the neighbour's backdoor and crawled across the yard just below him.

"Oh, god," he said, eying the blob as it wiggled and wobbled on the grass, "what is that!? It looks like a deformed and obese hamster with no arms or legs—oh, it's you, Smudge."

He groaned inwardly as Smudge the blob wormed his way onto the fence, his fat barely being contained within his alarming bodily mass.

"Hullo, bestie!" Smudge bubbled excitedly, his whiskers squiggling into Rusty's personal bubble almost immediately.

"No. Go bother someone else!" Rusty said, not wanting to be dragged into another one of Smudge's long rants about caterpillars or how the birds hate him or how the cat down the street hasn't returned his meow yet.

"What are you doing this morning?" Smudge continued, oblivious to Rusty's suffering. "You know, if you're free, we could go to the pond together or something…"

"I said no, Smudge! Besides, what you call a 'pond' is just a small pothole that sometimes fills with rain water. Now, I'm doing something really important at the moment, so if you'll excuse me-"

"Please, Rusty?" Smudge began to ripple with sadness, making Rusty nearly fall off of the fence.

"But Smudge," Rusty said, thinking quickly, "I think I hear, um, Misty calling you!" Misty was a completely made up cat, but Rusty doubted that Smudge could even recall his own name on most days.

"Oh…" Smudge said very slowly, twitching his whiskers thoughtfully, "…Misty! Oh, yeah. Maybe she wants to play?"

"Yeah, yeah," Rusty nodded. "I think you should, you know, see her instead of following me."

"That sounds right…goodbye, Rusty! See you around!" Smudge slid himself back onto the grass, which took about two whole minutes. Rusty sighed with relief and began to scamper back to his own yard, not wanting to give Smudge another chance at ensnaring him in another verbal trap.

After about an hour of trying to find something to eat, Rusty gave up and sat on the fence glumly. He slowly turned his head to the right, following a small ladybug as it made its way along the wood and—

"OH, MY GOSH," Rusty shouted as he noticed (for the first time) the gigantic forest that stretched into the distance just beyond the garden's boarder. "Just look at that forest…it looks so mysterious and dark and dangerous…ADVENTURE TIME!"

Rusty sprang from his perch and, landing (un)gracefully on the other side, happily marched towards the trees. His head filled with images of him stalking all sorts of small, helpless creatures…maybe, just maybe, this would be the day that he, Rusty Fluff Pawson, could find the lost and ever-eluding gold mouse.

Suddenly, a thick, gelatinous head bobbed in Rusty's peripheral vision.

"Where're you going, Rusty?" came Smudge's meow from the now unimportant distance.

"None of your business, fatso!" Rusty called back.

"You're not going in the woods, are you? There are all sorts of dangerous things in there…like thorns and beetles and…crocodiles…"

"There aren't any crocodiles in the forest."

"Well, you've never been in there before! How do you know?"

"They live in water, you moron!" Rusty walked faster, trying to put as much distance between him and Smudge's attention span (which is very small). The forest became thicker and he began to step over the roots of trees.

"But Rusty," Smudge wailed, "what if you die in there? What if you get kidnapped by wild cats, get trained in their ways, become their leader, and then die a pitifully inglorious death?"

"That'll never happen, not in a million years."

Rusty didn't hear Smudge's reply as he bounded into the forest's depths.


End file.
